A kid is crying inside. ‘Come on in,’ Carolina says, not pretending she is glad to see us. We take off our sunglasses and let her lead us to the living room. A cream leather sofa and a white cot stand at the centre of the room, facing a plasma screen. A gory crucifix hangs on the wall above the screen, and, if that wasn’t enough holiness for this household, the patronising face of Padre Pio stares at us from the wall behind the sofa. I have little sympathy for the saints, even less for the hip ones. Just below Padre Pio is another framed picture, in which Carolina and her husband, dressed for a boat trip, exhibit a rictus which is supposed to be a smile. Carolina is living the dream: she doesn’t work, spends her day at home taking care of her baby, alternates her Sundays between parents and in-laws, never forgetting, my dear, to go to mass and take the host, so that townsfolk can see how chaste is the heart beating in her chest. When my English friends ask me why I ever left this sunny, food-filled, wine-fuelled heaven, I would like nothing better than to shove their head into a life like hers, and keep it there until they gasp for breath.
Carolina scoops up the baby from the cot. The baby, unimpressed, pushes on with his gig. ‘I should’ve known Art is one of those who kiss and tell. Who else knows?’
I am going to say, You should be the one bragging that Art, a sodding genius, was ever between your legs, but Tony rushes to answer before I have time to. ‘Only our gang: me, Fabio and Mauro. We won’t tattle.’
‘As if anybody would believe you.’
I say, ‘I’m famous. They will.’ Which is, depressingly, true, inside Casalfranco’s borders. People here divide into two camps: either they go out of their way to ignore the fact that I am a slightly well-known fashion photographer, or they believe my fame is hot shit, rather than the small beer, soul-crushingly poorly paid affair that it actually is.
‘And that means what exactly? Is this some sort of blackmail?’
‘You know Fabio,’ Tony says, ‘he’s a joker. No, Carolina, listen, we only want to know if you’ve seen Art lately.’
‘Why?’
I have to raise my voice to cover the kid’s wailing. ‘We had an appointment and he didn’t show up.’
‘What are you doing in Casalfranco anyway? I thought you were in London.’
‘Just taking a couple of days off.’
‘Must be hard work, snapping photos of all those models,’ she says. It is all poison, no trace of actual sarcasm. With her free hand, she imitates the gesture of taking a photo. ‘Click, click, click.’
‘It’s all digital now. Clicks are gone.’ I’m fucked if I’ll let this idiot get to me.
‘About Art,’ Tony gently says. ‘Is he all right? He’s not picking up his phone.’
‘Not my problem. I dumped him, dunno, six or seven months ago.’
I am sure she remembers month, day and hour. ‘What happened?’
‘He was creeping me out.’
We are still standing. Carolina didn’t invite us to sit and, even worse, she didn’t offer us a cup of espresso, which in the south is tantamount to shouting in your face, Go fuck yourself with barbed wire. I make a show of sitting down on the sofa. ‘Care to elaborate?’
Carolina is rocking her baby up and down, which doesn’t stop the baby from crying. ‘How come you need me to explain Art?’
‘We’ve not been in touch, lately,’ Tony says.
‘Did he tell you of his Project?’
I can hear the capital P in the word. No, Art didn’t mention it.
Carolina savours the look of surprise on our faces. ‘That’s why he moved back to Casalfranco. For his Project.’
I ask, ‘Which would be…?’
‘It’s about that time he vanished.’
For a moment the stifling heat disappears, and a cold wind blows on my neck. ‘The time he was supposed to have run away, you mean.’
‘Maybe he ran, and maybe he didn’t.’ Carolina pulls back her lips in what she must think is a sly smile. ‘Actually, he told me one thing about that time.’ She savours each word as it rolls off her tongue; she knows something we don’t, which gives her a small amount of power over us. That must take her back to when, at sixteen, she had reached the high point of her entire life. ‘A secret.’
‘Please, Carolina…’ Tony says.
‘He took me into his confidence.’
‘Please. He’s our friend and we’re worried about him.’
She shakes her head. ‘I can keep a secret.’
Someone should remind this waste of space that her high point is well past. That someone being me. I take out my phone and tap on it.
‘What are you doing?’ she asks, amidst her kid’s howling.
I finish and turn the screen. I have written a Facebook post.
My best friend Art slept with a married woman, Carolina Mazziani! Go Art.
Carolina is tagged, and so is her husband, and so are a few common friends from that time.
Carolina’s eyes go wide. ‘You…’
‘I haven’t published it yet, but I’ll do it in three, two…’
‘You’re a bastard,’ she spits out.
‘And you, my dear.’
Carolina takes a deep breath and looks at Tony. ‘Art said only one thing.’ She pauses, but her attempt at drama is spoiled by the kid, who doesn’t get his cue to stop crying. ‘He said that he’d been shown opportunities.’
Tony and I exchange a look. I feel an echo of the eerie sensation I felt when Art disappeared – a creeping uneasiness, my skin turning into scales.
‘Did he explain?’ Tony asks.
‘You know Art. He said that his Project was all about grabbing those,’ one-handed air quote, ‘opportunities.’
‘And you don’t have a clue what he was talking about.’
‘It involved an awful lot of research.’
‘About?’
Carolina grabs the remote and switches on the gorilla-sized plasma TV set. She points the baby at the TV, like a gun. The baby keeps crying. ‘Religion, I guess.’
‘Religion? Art was the least religious person I ever met,’ I say. I vaguely recall that he did have a short brush with spirituality a while ago, in Paris. My opinion was, and still is, that he was in it for the girls.
‘Seriously, I didn’t care enough to listen.’
Or you weren’t clever enough to understand.
‘May I ask, why did you dump him?’ Tony says.
‘He was so obsessed with his Project that it wasn’t possible to have, like, a normal conversation with him anymore.’ She shows her tongue at her baby, in a gesture of motherly affection, which makes the baby cry louder. ‘We weren’t serious anyway. Just having some fun.’
‘Have you seen him lately?’ I ask.
‘What is this, an interrogation?’
I shake my phone. ‘Humour me.’
‘Yeah, I think so,’ she says, receiving my threat with a disgusted face. ‘I bumped into him once or twice. He barely said hello.’
‘And the last time would be…?’
‘Last week? Three weeks ago? Why should I remember?’
I can’t wait to get out of here, but I have to ask one last question. ‘Do you know where he gets his cash?’ Lately the value of money has been made clear to me.
And there we go, I finally have Carolina’s interest. She snaps her head towards me. ‘Cash? What makes you think he’s rich?’
‘I’m talking basic living expenses, for books, bills, car insurance…’
Her interest evaporates quicker than water in August. ‘He’s got savings I suppose. And every now and then… he’s not a dealer, like, proper, but he sells a little weed on the side.’
Art deals weed. In a small town with a strong Corona presence. I don’t need Mauro to tell me how quickly this could have escalated. If the Corona finds out there’s a dealer in town who is not on their books, they ask him either to get on their books or shut down shop. They ask gently, at first. The dealer being Art, his answer is long-winded and filled with detailed
anatomical theories on where they should put their books. Badness ensues.
This is Casalfranco, a voice inside me says. This is Casalfranco sucking you in. This is Casalfranco.
Get out while you can.
12
And I won’t be spared Anna.
Tony calls Mauro, and Mauro asks us to join him with his family on the beach. Casalfranco definitely has it in for me – nothing new there – and it is hitting me from every corner. Bring it on.
Being a sensible man, Tony is staying at his parents’, who, before retiring, had run a grocery shop for fifty years. He is driving now on the Litoranea Salentina, a long, winding coastal road. It runs through dunes on both sides, peppered with tamarisk trees, juniper bushes and wild flowers. The sight of the sea on our right, beyond the dunes, is breathtaking. You never get used to this sort of grandeur. The sea and the sky are matched shades of blue, reflecting each other, making you think you could swim in the sky or fly in the sea. The water is as transparent as lacy lingerie. Even from this distance, from a moving car, I can see the rocks at the bottom.
Tony pulls up by the roadside, behind Mauro’s car. In two weeks the road will be lined with cars, but it is early season now, so there is only us. The few holidaymakers who are already here don’t make it this far, keeping to the beaches of the villages. This means there are no illegal parkers yet; those guys who ask you for one euro to ‘guard’ your car – that is, not scratch it themselves. In the south, you need to bribe someone even to be able to park your car.
Facing the sea is a ruined torre Saracena, a Saracen tower, one of the many watchtowers built along the coast as sighting posts against Saracen pirates. It is a sturdy white block with a door halfway through its height, and an arched stone staircase leading to it. I take off my shoes and socks and leave them in the car. Saracen pirates ceased to be a thing a long time ago, and the towers are informally used as signposts for stretches of beach. I wish I had my trunks with me; I would love to take a dip. In jeans and shirt, the attire I was planning to wear on the air-conditioned flight back home, I am sweating like bacon on a grill.
Mauro sits under a large red umbrella with his daughters, reading today’s Corriere della Sera. The beach is largely empty, except for another umbrella, so distant that it looks like a parasol. Anna is floating far away from the shore. When she sees us, she starts swimming back towards terra firma.
‘Uncle Tony! Uncle Fabio!’ shouts Ottavia, the older girl, at five years. She is well trained; her enthusiasm at seeing us is not justified by the two times she has met me, and the three times, as far as I know, she has met Tony. When we get to the umbrella, Ottavia throws her arms around Tony. Rebecca, her little sister, snoozes on a beach towel.
‘Anna and the girls are leaving,’ Mauro says. ‘The sun’s getting too strong for children. Would you drive me home after we talk?’
‘Sure,’ Tony says.
‘And here come the boys!’
Anna drips water on the volcano-hot sand as she walks to us. The last time I saw her was three years ago, at Tony’s sister’s wedding, but I got drunk quickly, and we barely exchanged any words. I have been avoiding a moment like this, and even as we drove this way, I hoped against hope that it wouldn’t come. But then, so many of the moments we dread do come. We pay taxes, we overdraft, we lose friends, we die. We have our hearts broken.
‘Hi, Anna,’ I say.
She was gorgeous when we were young, and she is even more gorgeous now, two decades and two kids later. Her boobs are full, her hips large without being fat, her long, wet hair gleams in the sun as black as a total eclipse. She has cellulite on her bum, light wrinkles around her eyes, and she wears these signs of time proudly, as marks of honour. Anna doesn’t cast her beauty in amber; she lets it grow and change. It is one of the things I like about her. I’d tear off my clothes and tear off her clothes and fuck her silly in the sea right now, if I had a chance.
‘The three musketeers, minus D’Artagnan,’ Anna says, and why does she have to bend that way to get her towel? She wraps it around herself and, more or less covered, she undoes her bikini top to change into something dry. The top falls on the sand in slow motion. My mind stops processing everything that is not Anna: images of Anna’s breasts, bare under that fucking towel, keep coming at me, graphic, powerful. She is killing me. I don’t know if she is doing it on purpose or it is Casalfranco finding new ways to mess with me. I know I should avert my eyes, but would you? Lucky me, I have sunglasses.
Tony says, ‘Well, Art is…’
‘Art is missing again,’ Anna says, as she raises a foot to take off her bikini bottoms. ‘Mauro told me.’ I have seen women changing under a towel since I was a little kid. It is not supposed to be erotic. It is not supposed to be erotic. ‘I’ll leave you handsome men to talk while the ladies go home and spin silk.’ She can afford jokes – none of us are a patch on her. Anna is a professor of philosophy in Milan; the New York Times called her work on artificial intelligence ‘paradigm shifting’. Once she gets started on her theories, only Art can follow her.
When she packs and leaves with the girls, I feel like I just lost something precious. I am drenched in sweat. I take out a cigarette and light it, saying, ‘We’ve got bad news. Art’s dealing.’
‘As in…?’
‘As in.’
Tony and I bring Mauro up to date with our conversation with Carolina. It ends with Mauro shaking his head. ‘Fuck.’
‘Fuck indeed,’ Tony says.
‘That definitely rules the Carabinieri out.’
‘Wait. What?’ Tony asks, with an edge in his voice. ‘That makes it more urgent to talk to them, if anything.’
‘Art’s a dealer, Tony. That’s an order of magnitude worse than growing weed for yourself. We were at his house. Nobody will believe we weren’t there to buy.’
It is the seashore sun; it scorches you, it makes you edgy and unreasonable. We are locals; we should know better than to talk under this sun. You wait for it to set before discussing anything that matters.
‘Art’s supposed to be one of your best mates!’ Tony says, raising his voice. ‘And, oh, sir, I apologise if that looks bad on your CV.’
Mauro, too, raises his voice. ‘It’s not only about me! Do you think Art’d be happy to have the Carabinieri on his doorstep?’
‘Art is fucking missing,’ Tony half shouts.
‘Is he now?’
Tony makes to answer, then shuts his mouth, shuts his eyes, and takes a long breath to chill out. ‘Peace,’ he says, in a quieter tone.
Mauro lifts his hands. ‘Peace,’ he agrees. ‘Might be nothing, do you see what I mean? The first time, he came back unscathed.’
Tony says, ‘Not unscathed.’
‘He was healthy and…’
‘And whatever happened to him was so bad that he had to come up with a ridiculous lie.’
Mauro doesn’t reply. None of us ever bought Art’s story. We were young, we were naive, but we were not stupid. ‘Right,’ Tony says. ‘You know what? Let’s put it to vote. I want to have a chat with the Carabinieri, Mauro doesn’t. Fabio, it’s down to you.’
I am sure I am going to say, Carabinieri it is. If Art comes back in one piece, we will have landed him in a lot of trouble, but how can we be sure he will come back in one piece?
I am still thinking of Anna though.
I am still thinking of her breasts under the towel, of the stupid things we have done, which a part of me, a nasty, brutish part of me, wishes to do again, repeatedly. Every grown man carries a dick-driven teenager inside, and we have to be careful not to unleash him; but I can’t be careful under this sun. The teenager in me knows that if we go to the Carabinieri now, I will have no reason left to stay in Casalfranco, and no reason to meet Anna again in the foreseeable future. Not that I would ever make a move on her, because I wouldn’t.
I know I am digging myself into a hole when I say, ‘I’ll tell you what: we stick around two more days. If Art’s not back by then, we go to
the coppers.’
13
Lara called me while I was on the beach, where there was no signal. I find a voicemail when I check my phone, at the exit of a small rental where I asked Tony to drop me – you need to get your own mode of transport around here. The rental is a block of bricks by the roadside, surrounded by empty fields. I don’t know how customers are supposed to get here in the first place, if they don’t have Tony carrying them around.
‘Hey, dumbass,’ Lara’s voicemail says. ‘Planes are huge. I thought it was difficult to miss one.’
I call her back, and when she picks up I open by saying, ‘Don’t rub it.’
Lara laughs. She has a beautiful laugh, my Lara. She asks, ‘Did you get thoroughly pissed with your mates yesterday?’
‘Not really.’
She pauses, then says, ‘What’s wrong?’
The faint trace of a West Country burr in her voice makes her sound rougher than she is. I love that. ‘Art didn’t show.’
‘Why? What happened?’
‘I don’t know. His phone is dead.’
‘Have you tried his home?’
‘He wasn’t in. Tony – do you remember Tony? – is going there again, to see if Art’s back.’
‘Are you worried?’
‘I don’t know.’ I can’t explain the situation to her, not on the phone. In the three years I’ve been with Lara she’s never met the guys. I only came to Italy for the Pact, and none of them ever swung by London. Mauro was busy with his family, Tony with his surgery, and Art with whatever his obsession of the moment was. I told her about them, I told her about the Pact, but I didn’t mention the time Art disappeared. I let that story lie in its dark corner.
‘Did you talk to the Carabinieri?’
‘Not yet. We want to be sure it’s necessary.’
I know full well that Lara is picking up from my voice a lot more than I am saying. Falling for women smarter than me is my damnation (or is it possible, as Tony once jokingly pointed out to me, that all women are smarter than me?). She doesn’t press me. She says instead, ‘Are you sure you want to fly back tomorrow?’
The Book of Hidden Things Page 5